Years in the making, a $15 million renovation of the hall of sciences nears completion.

By Dustin Racioppi

On a campus tour several years ago, George Burrill C’65 was struck by the level of preservation at the Hall of Sciences. There were the floors of linoleum glued down before Woodstock, the original lighting still overhead, and splashes of salmon and chartreuse that recalled a set for Mad Men. In general, Burrill says, parts of the building “looked exactly as it had” when the building was constructed five decades ago. In an ever-advancing field like science, it should be noted, preservation is not always such a good thing.

“Clearly parts of it were out of date and they needed more space,” says Burrill, who was a political science major at Drew. “I think it was that walk-through that did it for me.”

So Burrill cut a check and issued a challenge: If Drew could raise $700,000, he’d donate $300,000, thus planting a million-dollar seed in the old, overlooked building’s renovation and expansion.

That challenge inspired a positive response from alumni, and grant money has helped fill the pot for the hall’s renovation. But the needs at the building in the northeast corner of the Forest are great. Piecemeal upgrades over the years have not kept pace with comparable colleges, such as Franklin & Marshall, which thoroughly renovated and expanded its science buildings, leaving Drew “behind the curve,” says Kenneth Alexo Jr., the vice president for university advancement.

Just matching what other liberal arts schools have done in their science programs will require a gift that challenges history. “We need a Dorothy Young for the Hall of Sciences,” says Alexo, referring to the late Drew donor who gave $14 million for Drew’s highly acclaimed center for the arts, which opened in 2003.

Alexo says Burrill’s $300,000 helped secure a state grant of $6.8 million last year—the biggest in Drew’s history. “George’s gift made a big difference in our ability to make a case to the state that this is a priority,” Alexo says.

The state grant required a match, and Drew did that and more by laying out $7.5 million, bringing the total earmarked for the hall to about $15 million. But that still doesn’t buy a new state-of-the-art science building. Renovations are expensive, sometimes more than tearing down and rebuilding, says Bob Fenstermacher C’63, a professor of physics emeritus who says he’s “essentially lived in the building its entire life so far.” Over the years, as plans were drawn and it seemed work would get going, sticker shock would halt progress, Fenstermacher says. The $15 million has kick-started overdue renovations already under way, but it still does not add what is needed most at the hall: more space.

Also, when the building opened in 1968, the bill came to $3.2 million—about $22 million in today’s dollars. It will cost at least that much to fully meet the renovation and expansion needs.

Few could argue the need. Planning for the Hall of Sciences got started in 1961, the year John F. Kennedy moved into the White House. When it opened seven years later, the hall was on the architectural cutting edge, boasting acoustic ceilings for fire protection, 100-square-foot laboratories for professors, filtered air and wall storage—features tantamount to hand-cranked windows and a cassette player in a new car today.

Technology has obviously come a long way, but so has the way science is taught—less lecturing, Alexo says, and more of an expectation “that students will learn by doing.” These days, Fenstermacher says, science professors are expected to conduct more research and include their students in the work. Yet the Hall of Sciences’ infrastructure has not been conducive to teacher-student collaborations in research.

The renovations now under way are split into two phases in four areas: the research annex; biology labs; Research Institute for Scientists Emeriti (RISE) and chemistry labs; and the psychology wing, the latter of which is perhaps the most desperate for attention and a space to call its own. Psych lab spaces had low ceilings and poor heating; they were small, dark, and unventilated, Fenstermacher says, “not structured for anything specifically.” This, despite psychology being the most popular major at Drew, with 94 students.

The psychology wing has been gutted and, in the first phase of construction, rebuilt with the discipline squarely in mind. Two new suites include cameras and mirrors for observation work. Computers were installed to collect and analyze data. And one classroom has been converted into two teaching areas, outfitted with smart technology and new furniture that will be used for research courses and seminars.

“The renovations have made this space inviting and an exciting place to be,” says Jessica L. Lakin, an associate professor of psychology and associate dean of the college. Before the renovations, she says, lab spaces were “not supportive” of the work being done in the department, regularly prompting students and faculty to seek other space to work in. “This space will also give a lot of coherence to our program,” says Lakin. “We now have dedicated space that is actually usable.”

More changes are coming to the biology department, which has seen four labs gutted and rebuilt over the last 15 years but in other areas remains firmly in 1968—lab benches, original sinks and stools, that linoleum tile.

Some renovations are already being broken in by students, such as in two upgraded labs on the first floor: one primarily for the Environmental Studies and Sustainability (ESS) program, the other for anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Both labs have cameras that can project demonstrations, slides, and other materials at the front of the room—“sort of like a cooking show,” says Christina McKittrick, the biology department chair. The new environmental science lab is already “in heavy use this year” for courses like freshwater ecology, animal behavior, and environmental geology, says Sara Webb, an ESS and biology professor. An important upgrade of the labs will be the switch from fixed to mobile benches, allowing for group work one day and lab work the next, she says. A new research room adjacent to the environmental science lab is “equally exciting” for students to collaborate on research projects or honors theses, Webb says.

The research annex had been scattered throughout the hall, but the renovation will bring it all within the first floor and the basement. The annex, expected to be ready in September 2015, will look more like a miniature hospital, Fenstermacher says, with colony rooms, cage-washing areas, surgery space, and a behavioral maze. And new electrophysiology and behavioral testing equipment will give students the opportunity to conduct sophisticated experiments to inquire about the relationship between brain activity and behavior. McKittrick offered some examples: measuring the abuse of drugs on a rat’s ability and memory in a maze; examining what happens to one area of the brain when a neuron transmitter in another area of the brain is manipulated; or measuring the neurochemical changes in rats when they encounter stressors, like the odor of a predator. And it can all be done in real time.

“All of these changes were designed specifically to facilitate student research, student inquiry, and scientific questioning, and allow the ability to ask questions that have not been answered and get away from some of the canned labs and do some real interactive scientific work—learning how to be a scientist, not just learning about science,” McKittrick says.

On the third floor, one new research lab is being built for the RISE program, which includes about a dozen retired scientists who work alongside students. It is the one new research space in the project. But the university is ready, even anxious, to dust off plans it has to add more space to the hall on the southern side. The only thing standing in the way is several million dollars.

The Donor Brigade

When Drew set out to upgrade the Hall of Sciences, a small army of donors stepped forward with early commitments of $10,000 or more.

Active Media Services Inc.

Dr. Elizabeth A. Alger C’60

George C. Burrill C’65

Judith E. Campbell P’94, G’10

Janeen Dougherty

Robert E. Fabricant C’85 and Emilia A. Fabricant C’88

William M. Freeman C’74 and Ellen Freeman

Fredrick Fuest C’68, P’02,’08 and Heather D. Fuest P’02,’08

Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Suzanne Harvey Hampton C’56

William T. Knox IV P’96 and Carolyn Benjamin Knox C’67, P’96

Estate of Edwin C. Kruse

Dr. David W. McIntyre C’86 and Margaret Kendziora McIntyre C’86

Betsy S. Michel

John Overdeck and Laura B. Overdeck

Pfizer Inc.

Ronald J. Saldarini C’61 and Suzanne Thomas Saldarini C’62

Nelson Schaenen Jr. and Nancy S. Schaenen

Dr. Howard F. Solomon C’70

Verizon

Robert A. Weisbuch and Candy J. Cooper

The Pied Piper

George Burrill’s gift inspired many others.

George Burrill made his mark in 1977, when he founded Associates in Rural Development, or ARD, in Vermont. Over the ensuing three decades the business evolved into a leading international economic development consulting firm, with annual revenue reported to exceed $100 million. ARD embarked on hundreds of projects involving agriculture, water supply, natural resources, and renewable energy. In one corner of the world the company might help a poor region find alternative development opportunities in rural areas ravaged by illicit crops, while in another corner it might help find renewable energy sources in a third-world country.

Burrill, who splits his time between Vermont and New Zealand, where he is an honorary consul to the United States, says science factored heavily in all his work with ARD. (He sold the company, now called Tetra Tech International, in 2007.) And in today’s increasingly competitive global economy, Burrill says science—even a basic knowledge of it—is vital.

“You’ve got to be able to analyze and absorb general scientific information and data,” Burrill says. “You’ve got to be a consumer of that information and data and be able to make decisions using that—and that’s apart from being a good citizen.”

His belief in the importance of scientific knowledge led Burrill to make his $300,000 donation for the renovation of the Hall of Sciences. It was Burrill’s first significant gift to Drew. “I’m interested in seeing the college have a full-rounded, strong academic program,” he says. The sciences, he says, “have to be a strong part of a liberal arts degree in general.”

Our story on the renovation of the Hall of Sciences is really a story about one very generous benefactor and the dozens of others he inspired. Together they helped make possible a $15 million project that will provide Drew’s science students and faculty with a slew of upgraded facilities. It’s an example of the partnership that helps keep Drew on the leading edge of higher education, and our voluminous Honor Roll of Donors contains the names of hundreds of supporters whose foresight will ensure that Drew stays there. To all of you, we give our thanks.

Jonathan Slaght C’98 travels to the densely forested river valleys of eastern Russia to study the world’s largest owl.

Photos courtesy of Jonathan Slaght

The photo is riveting. The backdrop: a thick forest with sizable patches of snow. In the foreground, a man, his dark hair closely cropped, his beard full, stares fiercely into the camera. You return his gaze almost before you notice that his arms are wrapped around a monumentally sized owl, one as substantial looking as a dog. Its vivid yellow eyes are resigned, looking off in the distance. From its mouth dangles the slender tail of a Dolly Varden trout, as if the bird has taken a polite pause in the middle of devouring its meal. Oddly, the tail curves from the hooked beak in such a way that it almost looks like a tusk, giving rise to a momentary confusion: Is this a bird or a beast?

Meet the Blakiston’s fish owl, one of the world’s rarest owls—and the largest—a behemoth that sits two and a half feet tall with wings that span an imposing six feet. These tufted-eared birds are so large and so seldom glimpsed that the odd fisherman, spying one from a distance, will think he’s looking at a human or a bear crouching down at river’s edge.

The man holding this winged giant is conservation biologist Jonathan Slaght, of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia Program. If he looks fierce, perhaps it’s because he spends about a third of the year in the Russian Far East, specifically in the Primorye wilderness between China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan. (The rest of the year he lives in Minnesota.) To get an idea of just how wild this area is, consider this is also the natural range of the Amur (or Siberian) tiger, the primary research and conservation focus of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Russia.

Slaght and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Surmach, travel to these remote river valleys in a heavy-duty flatbed truck that’s been outfitted with a two-room apartment. “It has a wood stove and it’s pretty comfortable,” Slaght says. “We can drive it anywhere, park it next to a river, put some wood in the stove, and we’re home.” Because he and his research partner will be out in the wilderness for up to a month at a time, they bring along giant sacks of rice and pasta that they’ll supplement with meat they get from the locals. “And the rivers are there,” Slaght says, “so we fish.”

The timing of the Blakiston’s fish owl field studies coincides with the region’s brutally cold winters. “Winter is the worst possible time to be living in a truck next to a river,” Slaght says. “The fish owls are as skittish as they are enormous. You can’t see them at all during the summer. At least in winter there’s tracks in the snow by the river. The best way to locate them is to look for their distinctive K-shaped footprints in the snow along the few spots along the riverbanks where the confluence of warm springs feeding into the river keeps the ice from forming completely. That’s where they hunt.” Still, snow can pile up in drifts as deep as six feet, and overnight temperatures can plunge to 40 degrees below zero. This is not a place for the faint of heart.

Which brings us back to the owl that Slaght holds so comfortably in the photo. She was captured the night before. Usually, when he and Surmach trap one, they let it go within an hour after banding and collecting data. This particular bird got very wet in the river during the capture. “What we do in those cases is keep them overnight until they dry off,” Slaght says. “And then we feed them a lot of fish because they lost the opportunity to hunt overnight.” By the time they’re released, they’re dry and sated.

But it’s actually not the trout dinner that has this bird looking so calm and unhurried in Slaght’s gauntleted arms. “The thing about these birds is they’re so big they’re not used to things attacking them— or doing anything to them,” Slaght says. “When they are captured, they’re basically stunned. They don’t fight back. You can apply a little bit of pressure to their wings and they sit there pretty calm.”

Although Slaght is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Blakiston’s fish owl, he almost never sees them either. Brown ghosts, he calls them. “You’ll see something brown flash a hundred meters upriver,” he says, “but I never get a really good look at them until we’re monitoring them on camera or sitting in a blind watching them by the river. Or doing captures. So it’s always a pleasure to handle one of them. They’re impressive to see.”

Slaght’s avian interest began with a much smaller bird. Maybe a finch, he says. He doesn’t remember exactly. A friend from high school visiting him at Drew for a weekend pointed out a bird and identified it as they walked through campus. Slaght hadn’t thought about birds much at that point. But if his friend knew what that bird was, then, by golly, he was going to learn too. Out of a healthy competitive instinct, the seed of a career was planted.

Russian language was already Slaght’s major. Later on in his Drew career he would add an environmental studies minor. His father was a diplomat stationed in Moscow in the early 1990s. One summer vacation his dad had business seven time zones away in Vladivostok, the capital of the Primorye province. He invited his son along.

“Flying in for the first time over the territory and landing in Vladivostok in the wilderness is incredible,” Slaght says. “Very few roads, just wilderness.” After that, he just kept going back. He spent a semester abroad in Vladivostok in his junior year. After college he joined the Peace Corps and spent the next three years there. It’s where he met his wife, Karen, also a Peace Corps volunteer.

Slaght was assigned a dual position teaching English and environmental education to children in village schools in the Primorskii krai. He lived in the village of Ternei, at the edge of the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve, a protected environment critical to the survival of many endangered species. Ternei is also home to the WCS’s Siberian tiger, musk deer, and Blakiston’s fish owl projects. Slaght worked with local scientists to set up ecology and bird-watching classes for his students. While Slaght nurtured the children’s curiosity with their environment, the society director fostered Slaght’s own burgeoning interests in wildlife. When Slaght enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 2002 to do graduate work in conservation biology, the director made it possible for him to do field work and conduct research on the Blakiston’s fish owl for his 2011 dissertation.

There wasn’t enough known about the owl’s specific range when Slaght started his PhD work. “They occur across a vast area of Northeast Asia, but at extreme low densities,” he says. “A lot of where we presume they live is just completely inaccessible—thousands of kilometers from the nearest road. It’s prohibitively expensive to actually go look for them.” Instead, Slaght outfitted the birds they were able to capture with little backpacks containing a GPS unit.

“It’s an accepted method for birds of that size,” Slaght says. “With WCS we’re putting these things on Siberian tigers and brown bears with collars that can weigh five to 10 pounds. Whereas for a bird with hollow bones, they really need to be as light as possible. We can only get a 90-gram unit on a bird.” That means the units are less powerful. With the tiger and bear projects, Slaght can sit tight in Minnesota and receive information from the satellite about the animals’ whereabouts. But data from the fish owls collects in the unit on the back of the bird. The researchers have to go back a year later, recapture the birds, and take the GPS for downloading.

One of the things they’ve learned is that fish owls keep pretty much to the waterways where salmon and trout are plentiful. “The furthest location we have from the river is 900 meters,” Slaght says. “So they’re really just flying up and down the rivers. They’re not going up into the mountains. In an area like Primorye, where it’s mountainous, all the roads, everything that goes through from village to village, are built in the river valleys. So they’re threatened by roads.”

Analysis of the GPS data, combined with information from the field studies, will provide the backbone for a conservation plan that will benefit not only the Blakiston’s fish owl, but other endangered species that depend on the Primorye’s combination of river valley and old-growth forest to live and breed.

Next on Slaght’s to-do list: He’d like to write a memoir of his experiences in the wilderness of Eastern Russia.

Taking Flight

Meet two more drew grads who made careers from their passion for birds.

DAN LANE C’95

As a toddler, Dan Lane’s favorite books were bird guides. By the age of 6, he illustrated his own field guide with crayons. When he didn’t have the right shade of brown for his red-tailed hawk, he used purple instead. By the time he was 12, he knew he wanted to be an ornithologist with a focus on South America.

At Louisiana State University, Lane (above left) studied neotropical birds. He discovered a new one on his first field expedition—to a Peruvian mountain so remote it took the LSU group a week and a half by canoe, a hike into the jungle to the base of the mountain, and then an arduous climb to the top. “This is what I’d been wanting to do all my life,” Lane recalls. The trek was made all the more glorious by his discovery of a striking black-yellow-red-and-white bird, now known as the scarlet-banded barbet, or Capito wallacei. Neotropical Birds, a website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, calls it “one of the most dramatic ornithological discoveries of recent years.”

Lane has been discovering new species of birds faster than he can do the rigorous scientific work of describing and proving the claim. He is in various stages of researching and writing about 10 new species at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, where he is a research associate. His charming illustrations of birds—these days he has access to all the shades of brown he needs—have been published in field guides and scientific articles, and he recently completed a series for the Baton Rouge Audubon Society. At Drew, he and Becky Harris knew each other as classmates in a painting class.

Lane also leads birding tours for Austin-based Field Guides, where this year he will lead excursions to Hawaii, Bolivia, and New Zealand as well as several regions of Peru, including Machu Picchu, the eastern slope of the Andes, and the Manu Biosphere Reserve.

BECKY HARRIS C’95

Becky Harris was 20 years old, still a student at Drew, when she spent a summer with a flock of interns on a tiny lighthouse island 18 miles off the coast of Maine. As part of Project Puffin, a National Audubon Society program to restore avian diversity to former nesting islands on which Atlantic puffins had once flourished, Harris (above right) was learning the grittier tools of her trade. On the 22-acre muddle of boulders called Matinicus Rock, home to a diverse colony of birds, Harris mapped nesting burrows, recorded hatching successes, and banded both chicks and adult birds—a process that is physically demanding and decidedly unglamorous. That birders call it “grubbing” should provide a hint, or a caution.

The nocturnal storm petrel nests deep in burrows it hollows out wherever it can find a patch of sod. The burrow is about as wide as a young lady’s arm, Harris says, and she should know. Many nights she laid on the ground with one arm squeezed into a petrel’s burrow up to her armpit. She’d feel around until she felt a little peck on her fingertips. Then she’d grab the bird by its unsuspecting beak and pull it out, whereupon it promptly threw up oily, orange, fishy-smelling stuff. “That’s their defense mechanism,” Harris says, “to barf out their last meal.”

After earning a PhD in biology from Tufts University, Harris started a seabird conservation project in 2002. Later she led the coastal bird program for Mass Audubon, which focuses on protecting beach-nesting birds—piping plovers, least terns, and American oystercatchers—in southeastern Massachusetts. Today Harris holds adjunct faculty positions at Tufts and at Brandeis University. But much of her focus is on her own nest. She and her husband, Fred, live in Boxborough, Massachusetts, where they’re raising two young daughters. It’s fieldwork of another sort, and often just as messy.

]]>http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/the-bird-man-of-primorye/feed/12014 Honor Roll of Donorshttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/2014-honor-roll-of-donors/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/2014-honor-roll-of-donors/#commentsSat, 15 Nov 2014 19:50:32 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7366http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/2014-honor-roll-of-donors/feed/0Hot Shotshttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/hot-shots/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/hot-shots/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 17:11:57 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7334Where can a Drew education take you in these uncertain times? Meet six members of the Class of 2014 with some pretty impressive answers.

Interviews by Dustin Raccioppi

R.J.
VOORMAN

Financial analyst
Merrill LynchNEW YORK CITY

How did your experience at Drew help your budding career?

At a business school you’re going to have blinders on. They’re going to teach you the system. Drew takes those blinders off and lets you understand everything that’s going on—because you have to take those other classes. And you want to take those other classes.

LAUREN
MESSECK

Assistant stage manager Midsummer Night Swing and Lincoln Center Out of Doors (Summer ’14) Lincoln Center for the Performing ArtsNEW YORK CITY

How did Drew
prepare you for
this job?

Had I gone to another college, I doubt that I would have developed the extensive résumé that got me the internship with Lincoln Center. Drew gives you the opportunity to be extremely involved and devote yourself to what you’re passionate about in a very real way.

MARIEL
HOOPER

Juris Doctor candidate
Harvard Law SchoolCAMBRIDGE, MASS.

How did you get
an interest in law?

We don’t think about how much the law influences the lives of people who really can’t afford lawyers and how disparate justice is in terms of favoring the wealthy. That’s something I care a lot about.

KHEMANI
GIBSON

Doctoral degree candidate
African diaspora history
New York UniversityNEW YORK CITY

How do you want to
make an impact on people’s lives?

Racial injustice is a big problem that we’re still facing across the world. As an academic, I would be able to do more than just be an intellectual on the subject. I would be able to actually contribute positively, whether it’s on the local level in my hometown or on the more national level, like conversations on race and how racism affects people of African descent.

NICK
CHIAPPINI

I would love to be a professor at a school like Drew, or even at Drew, because professorships at Drew and other schools like it are so different. At Drew I felt there was a really good balance between the professors’ involvement in teaching and also having access to do research—and especially do research with undergraduates, which was super appealing to me.

RANDA
BARSOOM

I did a research project at Drew with RISE [Research Institute for Scientists Emeriti]. I worked on a specific type of brain cancer, so I got really interested in that. I was just head-over-heels amazed at what a small organ can do and how much it can control, how everything you are, or will be, or were, is basically stored in that small five-pound organ. It’s amazing.

]]>http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/hot-shots/feed/0What’s New @ Drewhttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/whats-new-drew/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/whats-new-drew/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 15:58:34 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7287The start of a new school year brought to campus new sights, new faces, and new beginnings.

By Elizabeth Moore

Photos by Bill Cardoni

Moving In

On August 29 the sun rose at 6:20, precisely 20 minutes after first-year students and their parents began arriving on campus for move-in day. An hour later, members of the Orientation Committee, student-athletes, and other volunteers were hauling the newcomers’ belongings into the dorms. President MaryAnn Baenninger greeted the newly arrived students, lent a hand carrying bags, and posed for selfies. New and returning CLA students came from 31 countries around the world. They returned to a spruced-up campus, a renovated Hall of Sciences, and a new learning center on the first floor of the Rose Memorial Library—the Vivian A. Bull Academic Commons, named for Drew’s newly retired president.

A Higher Calling

The Rev. Dr. Javier A. Viera arrived on campus in July and was formally installed on October 16 as the 15th dean of the Theological School. Viera earned advanced degrees from the divinity schools at Duke and Yale and recently served as executive minister of Christ Church United Methodist in New York City. He says he was drawn to Drew because of the university’s commitment to expanding its global outreach and because of the energy, creativity, and passion of the Theo School faculty. “My vision for Drew Theological School is that it will be the most thriving, spiritually dynamic, intellectually inventive, risk-taking theological school in the world,” Viera said to applause during his installation in Craig Chapel.

A Center of Explosion

Built of recycled bluestone between the Hall of Sciences and Madison Avenue, Drew’s new labyrinth offers an area for quiet contemplation. In a labyrinth, wrote the designer, Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen, a professional stone carver and the coordinator of the Korn Gallery, “it is not possible to be lost; unlike a maze, a labyrinth has only one direction.” Installed over the summer and formally dedicated on September 16, the labyrinth was made possible by donations from faculty, staff, alumni, and others. “My labyrinth center looks like many buzzing individual cells, a center full of live forces,” Hiltl-Cohen wrote in her plans for the sculpture. “It is a center of explosion and at the same time it gives me an intense feeling of quietness.”

Cunningham, who played baseball at Drew, received the 2014 Alumni Achievement Award in Business.

Founder, Leather Head Sports

In the fall of 1989 I moved to Long Island, where my grandparents live, with the idea that it would be easier to find a job in New York City than in Cooperstown, where I grew up. During that time I started fiddling around with leather, making lemon ball–style baseballs. Those are the vintage baseballs that I had played with while I was working at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Around 2005 I revived my leather hobby. It really kind of took hold and got deeper roots. And now it’s my full-time gig.

Lemon balls look kind of like baseballs, but the stitch pattern is different. They have a historical place in the game, so there was amarket for them.

Around 2008 I became engrossed with the leather hobby. I saw the potential for that to be a successful business. I knew I had to evolve beyond a single product. I use the sculptural form of a sports ball as the template to showcase this beautiful leather and craftsmanship.

I’m in Glen Rock, New Jersey. I have five full-time employees and five part-time people. They take materials home, work at home, and return the finished pieces to me.

There are a lot of leather crafters out there who are a lot more talented than I am. But they’re all basically doing the same thing. Nobody’s out there doing sports balls. And in that sense I own this space.

The baseball gloves are the only things we don’t physically make here. They’re made in a baseball glove factory in Indonesia. Believe it or not, it’s one of the best in the world.

I can certainly tell a good piece of leather from a bad piece. It has to have certain sensory qualities. It has to look good, feel good, smell good.

Most products we make are actually sewed together inside out and then inverted. If the leather is too thick, you can’t invert it. If the leather is too thin, it feels cheap. If it doesn’t have a certain, inherent heft to it, that’s not necessarily going to work for me either.

We’re doing a lot of work for the White House. They sell my basketballs, baseballs, and footballs, and they all have the presidential seal. It has a ton of detail on it. It was a real trick to get that presidential seal embossed in a ball.—CHRISTOPHER HANN

]]>http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/backtalk-paul-cunningham-89/feed/1Mead 207 | Message from the Presidenthttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/mead-207-message-from-the-president-2/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/mead-207-message-from-the-president-2/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 15:57:44 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7326“In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp, praise song for walking forward in that light.”

—From Praise Song for the Day, by Elizabeth Alexander

I love this verse, from a poem written for President Obama’s first inauguration, because it captures so well the sense of eagerness and anticipation we experience when we are on the verge of great new ventures, ideas, or accomplishments. As I begin my presidency at Drew University, I feel strongly a palpable sense of being “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.”

I realize there is much work to do to ensure that Drew sustains its shine and its sparkle for generations to come. The higher education environment is increasingly competitive. It is not enough to be an excellent university. We must get better at telling the world about the specific strengths and distinctions that Drew offers its students, and we must be relentless in sustaining the quality of education in all three schools. This means Drew, at its core, will remain recognizable to alums, but it also means we must respond, in the words of Drew’s mission statement, “to the urgent challenges of our time with rigorous, independent, and imaginative thought.”

In this highly competitive higher education environment, institutional passivity is not an option. Drew must chart its own destiny. To that end, we are highlighting what Drew does best, where it provides a distinct education, and what sets Drew apart from the rest of the pack. With relentless intensity we will make these characteristics known to prospective students. Drew will not be a “hidden gem” but rather a shining star for all to see. And we will achieve this goal with your support.

This issue of Drew Magazine is about new beginnings, about spreading our wings (quite literally in one feature), and, more broadly, about Drew’s “sharp sparkle.” To feel the sense of eagerness and to overcome the sense of anxiety we feel when we embark on new ventures, we first must feel grounded. Home is the place that provides us with a sense of security and a firm foundation of learning. Ultimately, home is the place from which we venture when we commit to “walking forward in that light.”

What has struck me most about beginning my presidency at Drew is how much I already feel at home. I spent much of my career in New Jersey, and my husband, Ron, and our daughter-in-law, Lucy, both grew up not far from Drew. And because we are coming home from a very different part of the country—Minnesota—everything about Madison feels like home. From the weather (an incomparable summer) to the foliage (acorns, rather than tornado hail plinking on my car), to our friendly family of neighbors (eight deer who regularly eat breakfast outside our front door), to the universal affirmation we’ve received from the campus community about our choice to live on campus, all things make us feel at home.

Home, literally, is Hilltop House, the President’s House at Drew. We are the first family to live in the house since President Paul Hardin left office in 1988. Being at home here means I can devote my attention to the important work of ensuring Drew’s future, without the stress of a commute or any kind of a distance, literal or figurative, from Drew.

Living in the Drew neighborhood also means Ron and I will get to know campus community members as individuals with interests, passions, and dreams. Since I am one of the newcomers, along with our first-year CLA students and new Theo and Caspersen students, community members also want to get to know me. Leslie Garisto Pfaff’s article helps to serve that purpose.

So the theme that permeates this issue of the magazine is one of “walking forward,” but from the security of home ground. One article is about CLA graduates from the Class of 2014 who left their home at Drew to pursue their first adventures in careers and in graduate schools. Another story explores the worlds of three scientists—Drew graduates further along in their own careers—who study birds and their behaviors, often in far-flung corners of the globe. (Perhaps this is “flying forward” rather than “walking forward.”) Yet another story reports on the nearly complete second phase of renovations at the Hall of Sciences.

This issue of Drew Magazine also highlights the annual Honor Roll of Donors. These are people who know and understand that Drew’s “sharp sparkle” will be most obvious if its alums, friends, and benefactors pay it forward, and to them I offer my profound gratitude on behalf of the university.

MaryAnn Baenninger

]]>http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/mead-207-message-from-the-president-2/feed/1An Eye for Detailhttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/an-eye-for-detail/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/an-eye-for-detail/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 17:34:03 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7273MaryAnn Baenninger, Drew’s new president, has wasted no time making an impact in the Forest.

by Leslie Garisto Pfaff

Baenninger is just the fourth Drew president to live on campus in Hilltop House.

It might have looked like a traditional letter of welcome to Drew’s incoming first-year students, but this year’s version bore something unexpected: the hand-written signature of Drew’s new president, MaryAnn Baenninger. In fact, Baenninger personally signed her name to every last letter, a habit she developed during her previous tenure as president of the College of Saint Benedict, in Minnesota. Faced with crafting a message explaining the rationale for a larger-than-usual tuition hike, she had an epiphany. “What a wimp I am,” she remembers thinking. “I’m sending all these letters out and I’m not even going to put my signature on them? These people are spending thousands and thousands of dollars.” So she took it upon herself to hand-sign each letter and use the time to reflect “on the enormity of my responsibility.” For Baenninger, the details matter.

That attention to detail could be the key to Baenninger’s success as Drew’s 13th president, a position she assumed on July 21. At a time when American universities are struggling—with escalating costs, burgeoning student and institutional debt, and even questions about the relevance of a liberal arts education—Baenninger (pronounced BEN-in-ger, with a hard g) understands that every decision could be crucial. “Right now,” she says, “Drew needs someone who’s going to get deeply involved and not just sit in a lofty position and think, but act as well.”

Baenninger is already deeply involved. She and her husband, Ron, a retired professor of psychology, have chosen to live on campus in the presidential residence, Hilltop House, making her only the fourth university president to do so. The decision was more than symbolic, especially during her first weeks at Drew. “Because I live on campus, I was able to get to know the facilities team and the housing team and the infrastructure people before the students and the faculty came back,” she says. She also met with the cabinet five times over the summer, delving into financial matters and developing a keen sense of how things work at Drew from an administrative standpoint. She emerged from those meetings with an understanding of what Drew does well and what it could do better.

A case in point is Drew’s proximity to New York City, an asset Baenninger, as a self-described “East Coast girl”—she was born and raised in Philadelphia—clearly values. Drew has built on that proximity with the creation of three highly successful programs: the New York Semester on Contemporary Art, the Semester on the United Nations, and the Wall Street Semester, all of which allow students to study in the city. (A fourth New York program, the Semester on Communications and Media, begins in the spring.) The programs themselves are strong, notes Baenninger, but they haven’t been strongly promoted. “I’ve been in higher education for my whole career,” she says, “and I didn’t know Drew had a program on Wall Street. As wonderful as Madison is, it’s our proximity to New York that should make us stand out.” Baenninger also plans to expand the opportunities for experiential learning, not just in New York but in Newark—and even in Madison. “We need to enhance our relationships with the corporate, arts, and nonprofit sectors in all three communities,” she says.

She wants Drew to more vigorously publicize the unique features of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, including the Master of Arts in Teaching, that can also be added to a CLA degree for a five-year program, and the Medical Humanities program, which aims to integrate all aspects of culture—including ethics, philosophy, history, literature, art, religion, and science—into the practice of medicine. “There’s a crying need for those who work in the medical field to take a more humanistic approach,” Baenninger says, “and we’re on the cutting edge of that at Caspersen.”

Making the most of the university’s existing assets—including, in her words, “one of the best theological schools in the country”—while creating what she describes as “an upward spiral of enthusiasm for the future” is essential, Baenninger says, to “putting the shine back” on Drew. That last phrase was actually coined by Peggy Howard, Drew’s vice president for administration, but it immediately resonated with the university’s new president. It’s a process Baenninger knows well from the decade she spent as president of Saint Benedict. “Saint Ben’s had identity issues,” she says. “They’re very different from Drew’s identity issues, but the similarity is that we needed to get the word out.”

When first-year students arrived on campus in late August, Baenninger was there to lend a hand.

Charged with raising Saint Benedict’s national profile, she helped bring a Phi Beta Kappa chapter to the college, increased funding for research projects while encouraging researchers to present those projects at national conferences, and vigorously promoted the institution herself as a writer and speaker. Her work paid off: Last year U.S. News & World Report listed Saint Benedict’s among its top six “up-and-coming” liberal arts colleges nationwide.

Baenninger also helped increase Saint Benedict’s annual fund—the amount raised during the university’s fiscal year that helps support its operating budget—and oversaw the largest capital campaign in its history, and she hopes to repeat the process at Drew. She notes that in 2014, Drew and the College of Saint Benedict raised “almost exactly the same amount of money”—$11 million. But Drew, she says, has a much stronger financial base to tap, “so we can stretch ourselves further.”

Luckily, Baenninger relishes the prospect of fundraising, which isn’t surprising given her obvious people skills. On the first day of classes, she was out on the lawn of Mead Hall, introducing herself to the students gathered there and then quickly moving on to the more important business of establishing common ground. She asked a group of young women where they’d spent the summer, launching a give-and-take on the relative merits of Long Beach Island versus Cape May. And she made sure to find out what brought each of them to Drew, a process that yielded a variety of responses, from “the great science program” and “the small school environment” to a desire to work in New York City after graduation. “When I approach people and ask their names,” she says, “it’s because I really want to know about them.”

Baenninger credits her ability to work a room—or a lawn—to her father, Len Hulme, a successful executive in the frozen food industry who never went to college. “He’s a connector,” she says. “He remembers everybody he ever met. If he were to talk to you, in 10 minutes he’d find someone you know in common because he’d asked you a couple of salient questions about your life.” It’s probably not surprising, then, that Baenninger, who received a doctorate in psychology from Temple University in 1991, wrote her dissertation on facial recognition. Specifically, she found that children, like adults, were more likely to recognize a particular face by using “configurational” information—the general layout of the face—rather than “featural” information—specific features like a mouth, nose, or eyes.

Nora Newcombe, her PhD adviser at Temple and later her collaborator on a series of studies about gender differences in cognition, remembers Baenninger’s “breadth of vision and excellent eye for what really matters in research.” Newcombe recalls a paper they co-published in 1989, based on Baenninger’s suspicion that gender differences in spatial intelligence—the ability to comprehend and mentally manipulate 3-D images and shapes—stemmed from experience and not innate ability. “It’s been very influential, and it’s stood the test of time,” Newcombe says, noting that the paper has been cited more than 400 times in the intervening years.

“When I approach people and ask their names,” Baenninger says, “it’s because I really want to know about them.”

Baenninger’s interest in gender may derive, in part, from a sense that her own personality “straddles the masculine and the feminine.” Her role as a leader, she says, means she isn’t afraid to deliver a hard message, but she’s always conscious of “taking care of the person I’m delivering that message to.” Being a female university president, at a time when just one in four college presidents in the United States are women, doesn’t particularly scare her. “I’ve done this for 10 years,” she says, “so I know for a fact that it hasn’t been a stumbling block.”

Her mother, Mary Hulme, who didn’t hew to a female stereotype either, has always been a role model for Baenninger, who credits her with passing along a drive to understand how things work—and if they weren’t working, how to fix them. “My mother didn’t work outside the home, but she was really smart about things and processes and complicated systems,” Baenninger recalls. “If the vacuum cleaner was broken, she’d just take it apart and fix it.” To her mother, she also attributes her eye for detail, something she applies equally to her work as president and her leisure pursuits. Baenninger, who has two grown children and four grandchildren, is currently grappling with the structural difficulties inherent in designing a Halloween rooster costume for her 6-year-old grandson.

Those work-related details may seem insignificant, but they’re always part of a broader view. Baenninger had been at Drew for only a few weeks when she discovered that three of the four campus gates were locked at night and the only way to determine which gate was open was an irritating trial-and-error. To Baenninger, the problem wasn’t just practical but metaphorical: The closed gates reflected a campus that effectively hid its light under a bushel. Today, new signs on the fence direct newcomers and visitors to the open gate.

In a sense, those signs are an acknowledgment that each decision Baenninger makes in her time at Drew will have an impact not just on an institution but on the people who make up that institution. It’s a point of view she brings to another pressing issue in her role as president: the challenge to increase first-to-second-year retention rates. Over the past year, Drew’s retention rate—the percentage of students who return to the college after completing their first year—rose from 75 to 84 percent. That jump is clearly good news, but Baenninger believes that Drew can, and should, do better. She wants to bring the university’s retention rate closer to those of its peer institutions, which is about 91 percent. The solution, she says, is to “focus almost on the individual level”—in other words, to create an environment in which first-year students feel their needs are being met and their voices are being heard.

The challenge, of course, will be to find ways to make that happen, but Baenninger relishes a challenge. In 2001, after 12 years of teaching undergraduate psychology (including nine years as an associate professor at The College of New Jersey), she was, she says, “ripe to make a change.” A staunch defender of the value of a liberal arts education—among whose benefits she lists “resourcefulness, resilience, adaptability, and the ability to look at things from different directions”—she wanted to make an impact on the landscape of higher education. She accepted the position of executive associate director at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an association that provides peer accreditation to 525 member colleges and universities in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Andrea Lex, the current vice president at Middle States, calls Baenninger “a natural leader willing to embrace tough questions.”

At her first faculty meeting, in early September, Baenninger happily fielded a series of tough questions, including one of the toughest to answer at this juncture: “Where will we be in five years?” Acknowledging that it was still too early to address the question in its entirety, she was nevertheless certain about a number of things: “When someone says liberal arts and New York,” she stressed, “they should say Drew. When someone says liberal arts and a cappella groups, they should say Drew. When someone says the sciences and an incredible faculty, they should say Drew.”

On the first day of classes—which happens to be the hottest day of the year—Baenninger is helping to get that conversation started. She and nearly 100 other intrepid souls are assembled on the sunny lawn in front of Mead Hall to take part in a video publicizing One And All, Drew’s ambitious fundraising campaign. As part of the video shoot, each of the participants, Baenninger included, has been handed a sheet of poster board and instructed to hold it up. As their arms rise in unison, Baenninger’s voice rings out with an essential question: “Horizontally or vertically?” Of all the staff, students, and faculty taking part in the video shoot, she is the only one to ask the question. For a leader who clearly sees the big picture, Baenninger is more than willing to sweat the small stuff.

photos by Bill Cardoni

]]>http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/11/an-eye-for-detail/feed/0The Influentialshttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/04/the-influentials/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/04/the-influentials/#commentsWed, 16 Apr 2014 17:54:42 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7178They live on three continents and do business on five. They set education policy and organize protest marches. They conduct research on the great apes and provide housing for the working poor. They’ve been Broadway producers and U.S. ambassadors and presidential advisers, and these 17 high achievers find common ground at Drew.

By Christopher Hann

M. Teresa Ruiz ’98

Two years ago Teresa Ruiz persuaded lawmakers to support a bill that would overhaul New Jersey’s century-old teacher tenure law. Her sponsorship meant Ruiz had to confront the New Jersey Education Association—the teachers union—probably the most powerful lobby in Trenton. Yet by the time both houses of the Legislature approved the bill in June 2012, NJEA was also supporting it, and Ruiz’s colleagues were offering career advice. According to The Star-Ledger: “Stunned lawmakers jokingly suggested Ruiz head to the Middle East to broker a peace accord.” For the record, Ruiz stayed put. The first Latina to serve in the state Senate, she continues to focus on education issues. Last year she sponsored the New Jersey DREAM Act, which allows children of immigrants who came to the United States illegally to qualify for in-state tuition at public colleges. “The greatest equalizing factor we have in this country is education,” Ruiz says. “I do this because I know that through education and policy, we can change a whole generation’s life.”

William J. Barber II T’03

“Having studied at Drew,” says the Rev. William Barber, “I don’t know how to be a theologically sound Christian without being engaged in social justice.” Where Barber is concerned, engaged might be an understatement. Barber made national headlines last year for leading a clergy-based protest movement that came to be known as Moral Mondays. The movement has excoriated the actions of North Carolina’s Republican governor and Republican-led state legislature, which, since gaining a supermajority in 2012, has cut spending on schools and programs for the poor, frozen teacher pay, ended same-day voter registration and restricted early voting—“the worst voter suppression since Jim Crow,” Barber says. More than 900 people were arrested during last year’s protests, Barber among them. But it appears their voices have been heard. Public opinion polls show support for the governor and legislature plummeting. The movement, Barber says, “gives people a place to reimagine a better way to the higher ground of justice and community.”

Robert Kopech ’73

Retired Vice President and Chief Risk Officer, The World Bank, Short Hills, N.J.

Over the course of a 35-year career in the financial world, Robert Kopech focused on emerging markets around the globe. So he was well suited to accept a position, in June 2011, as the first chief risk officer at the World Bank, where he oversaw the multitude of risks associated with the bank’s extensive worldwide investments. Kopech describes the World Bank’s goal to eliminate acute poverty by 2023 “an ambitiously achievable target,” even with 2 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. “I’m not naïve about the political realities of the institution, with such a far-flung ownership structure,” he says. “It doesn’t take much thought to realize the perspectives of Mali and Vietnam are not going to be completely congruent.”

Joyce Reilly ’74

“I think I’d always wanted to be a healer of some kind,” Joyce Reilly says. On her first day at Drew she met a classmate who had worked summers at Gould Farm, a working farm in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts and the nation’s first therapeutic community for psychiatric patients. Reilly’s life course as a healer was more or less set. In time she would help found a therapeutic community in Pennsylvania and help lead a New Jersey alliance devoted to stopping the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. But as Reilly will attest, the work of a healer never really ends. Eight years ago she helped start another therapeutic community in Pennsylvania, Adesha Village, where she recently started working full time as co-director.

Fatou Diallo ’13

Corporate Finance Associate, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Fatou Diallo was born in Ivory Coast, the daughter of Senegalese parents, and spent her senior year of high school in Egypt. She chose Drew largely for its opportunities for international education, and as a senior she interned at the United Nations. Today she’s working with her father, an investment banker, helping to facilitate infrastructure projects throughout western Africa. “My father is always trying to pull me toward the banking world,” Diallo says. “I always tell him, ‘I still have my humanitarian side.’ Eventually, I think I want to go back to Senegal, to work in a position of power that would allow me to have a positive influence on the lives of Senegalese people.”

Tanya Linn Bennett T’00, G’05, T’11

Drew University Chaplain, Madison, N.J.

If there is such a thing as a daughter of Drew, surely her name is Tanya Linn Bennett. Her father, Theodore C. Linn T’64, G’71, was a seminary student at Drew when Bennett was born, and later he spent 10 years as the university chaplain. When Bennett decided to pursue a master in divinity degree, naturally she enrolled at Drew. And after earning her degree, she went to work at Drew. In 2006 Bennett reestablished the Office of University Chaplain. Retracing the path that returned her to the Forest, she’s drawn to a favorite quote by the writer and theologian Carl Frederick Buechner: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Leo Grohowski ’80

Chief Investment Officer, BNY Mellon Wealth Management, NYC

Leo Grohowski oversees an office of 425 people who manage $180 billion in client assets. But career demands have not prevented Grohowski from keeping close ties to the small liberal arts university that he credits with giving him his start in the business world. In fact, Grohowski says one of the most influential figures he encountered at Drew was a finance professor named Vivian Bull. The future Drew president steered Grohowski toward two critical internships, where he saw the lessons he learned at Drew put to a daily test in the business world. Grohowski served 12 years on Drew’s Board of Trustees, and in 2007 he and his wife, Nancy, funded a scholarship for economically disadvantaged students majoring in economics. “With the help of Drew and those internships, I found a field I thought I might like 33 years ago,” Grohowski says, “and here I am today.”

Robert E. Schmidle Jr. ’75

His nearly 40-year career as a Marine Corps pilot and officer has taken Robert Schmidle to the upper echelon of the U.S. military and into some of the most dangerous places on earth, including the skies over Baghdad on the first night of Operation Desert Storm. Schmidle has served as the deputy commander for U.S. Cyber Command and as the Marines’ deputy commandant for aviation, overseeing a $6.8 billion budget. These days Schmidle, who is married to Pamela Jutkus Schmidle ’74, is also pursuing a doctorate from Georgetown that combines social psychology, philosophy and literature. “The people I admire in history are folks that have been very thoughtful,” Schmidle says, “folks who lived in the world, who were able to have a foot in both camps.”

Liz Timperman ’92

Executive Director, Olympus Theatricals, NYC

Liz Timperman came to Drew determined to make a life in theater. While at Drew she acted in, directed and stage-managed student productions and served as chair of the Drew University Dramatic Society. As a senior she received the first President’s Award in Theatre Arts, initiated by former Drew President Thomas H. Kean. Today she’s the executive director of Olympus Theatricals and the recipient of a Tony Award for co-producing La Cage aux Folles, which won Best Revival of a Musical in 2010. Two decades after graduating from Drew, Timperman’s life in theater seems as busy as ever. “I’ve never moved into any other career path,” she says. “That’s both exciting and a little terrifying.”

Deedee Corradini

President, Women’s Ski Jumping USA, Park City, Utah

Deedee Corradini had no idea that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had never allowed women to compete in ski jumping until she happened to run into Lindsey Van, a future world champion, at a real estate class in Salt Lake City in 2004. Corradini, who attended Drew in the early 1960s, had already served two terms as mayor of Salt Lake City and helped bring the Winter Games to Utah in 2002. She saw IOC’s snub as an injustice against women, and over the ensuing decade she set out to make it right. On the day in April 2011 when the IOC announced it would add women’s ski jumping to the Winter Olympics, the American team was gathered in Corradini’s home in Park City, Utah, huddled around the dining room table, listening to a live press conference from London. “As soon as they said, ‘women’s ski jumping,’ we all whooped in excitement,” Corradini recalls. “Almost just as fast, there was dead silence. I cried. It was really more relief. It took a long time.” In February, when the American women jumped in their first Winter Games, in Sochi, Russia, Corradini was there to cheer them on.

Clint Bolick ’79

Vice President for Litigation, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Ariz.

While still in kindergarten, Clint Bolick counted among his heroes Barry Goldwater, the U.S. senator from Arizona who was the very face of American conservatism in the early 1960s. Half a century later, Bolick is making a name for himself as a constitutional lawyer at the libertarian think tank that bears his hero’s name. Bolick’s most recent book, Immigration Wars: Forging an American Revolution (Threshold Editions, 2013), co-written with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, advocates improving opportunities for legal immigration, a position that conflicts with mainstream Republican thought. Early in his career, when Bolick worked at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he worked under a little-known commission chair named Clarence Thomas. “I’ve been extremely lucky throughout my life in terms of having amazing mentors,” Bolick says. At Drew, a constitutional law course taught by the late professor Robert Smith steered him toward a legal career. “It just all completely came together for me,” Bolick says. “I discovered that constitutional law is a way that a person motivated by principle could make a big difference in the world.”

Arturo Valenzuela ’65

Professor of Government, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Growing up in Chile, the son of missionaries (and Drew graduates), Arturo Valenzuela could not have imagined teaching at prestigious American universities or counseling two U.S. presidents on foreign policy. But then one day the ground shook. And in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, Valenzuela’s parents sent him, at age 16, to America, and eventually to Drew, where he thrived. He came to Georgetown from Duke in 1987, never intending to enter government, yet he came to advise Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the latter as assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs—the region’s chief American diplomat. “It’s sort of ironic that even having chosen an academic career, I wound up choosing public policy,” Valenzuela says, “and Drew set me in the right direction for that.”

Betsey Hall T’84

President & CEO, Homeless Solutions Inc., Morristown, N.J.

Betsey Hall has witnessed firsthand the plight of the working poor. Homeless Solutions, the nonprofit agency she has led since 1998, works to find housing for homeless people in Morris County, N.J., where the median value of owner-occupied housing is $446,800. “It’s a busy world I live in,” Hall says. In Hall’s world, 54 percent of the people who arrive at the doorstep of the agency’s 85-bed shelter already hold full-time jobs. “The solution is not to build more shelters,” she says. That’s a big reason why Homeless Solutions has gone into the business of building affordable homes. In recent years the agency has constructed or renovated 76 homes, all with an eye for energy efficiency. With a $3 million budget, Homeless Solutions employs a staff of 53 and benefits from a battery of 600 volunteers. Hall, an ordained Presbyterian minister, earned a master of divinity degree from the Theo School, where, she says, she gained a greater understanding of the social and economic inequities in modern American life. “I see so many people struggling so hard in a system that they can’t change,” she says.

Joshua A. Drew ’98

Lecturer in conservation biology, Columbia University, NYC

Joshua Drew has been researching fishery conservation practices in the Fiji islands for the past decade. But two years ago he had only to hop a flight to Chicago to make a discovery that startled the world of marine ecology. At the Field Museum of Natural History, Drew studied a collection of weapons fashioned from shark teeth—“Oh, my God, they’re so cool looking”— by the people of the Republic of Kiribati, an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean. His tests determined the teeth came from the dusky and spot-tail sharks—two species no longer found near Kiribati. The phenomenon is known as shadow biodiversity, in which we discover that a species once inhabited a region where it’s no longer found. “It means that what we thought was a natural reef already showed symptoms of human disturbance,” Drew says.

Phillip Carter III ’80

Deputy to the Command for Civil-Military Engagements, U.S. Africa Command, Stuttgart, Germany

When Phillip Carter joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1981, just a year out of Drew, his first post was at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Then Canada. Then the Caribbean. Then Malawi, in southern Africa. “It was there,” Carter says, “that I fell in love with the African continent—what it offers, and what impact we can make there.” Africa has anchored Carter’s 33 years in the diplomatic corps—he served as the U.S. Ambassador in both Guinea and Ivory Coast. At the U.S. Africa Command, Carter, who holds the diplomatic rank of minister-counselor, helps coordinate myriad aid programs for African countries, from humanitarian assistance to disaster response. “The job of an American ambassador is unique,” Carter says. “You see where we as a country can really make a difference.”

Craig Stanford ’78

Craig Stanford was living in Bangladesh in 1988 when, on a whim, he wrote to Jane Goodall in Tanzania to propose a study of chimpanzees and their prey. Four months later, when Stanford returned home to California, he received Goodall’s affirmative response. Thus began a two-decades-long collaboration with the world’s foremost primatologist and Stanford’s own prolific career as professor, researcher and author. Recently he’s been traveling to Madagascar to supervise graduate students studying the ploughshare tortoise, among the world’s rarest species. The latest of his 16 books, Planet Without Apes (Belknap Press, 2012), documents the threats endangering the four existing great apes. “I liken it to the idea that if you have a close relative who is dying, and they could be saved, and it would require some effort on your part and money to save them, would you bother to save them?” Stanford says. “Hopefully, you’d do the moral thing.”

Archie Cox ’91

Owner, Brookway Stables, Lake View Terrace, Calif.

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, Archie Cox is the grandson of the Watergate-era special prosecutor who, in October 1973, was so famously fired by President Richard Nixon. But this Archibald Cox has carved an entirely different career path as a trainer of champion equestrians. Cox founded Brookway Stables in 2000 and has since trained 25 national champions (these days his youngest student is 11; his oldest 71). In 2011 the California Professional Horseman’s Association named Cox its Horseman of the Year. “It never occurred to me I would do anything else,” he says. “We work hard. We play hard. We enjoy life. I’m very lucky that my job is my passion.”

Not long after 9/11, MaryAnn Baenninger, like a lot of Americans, found herself in a reflective mood, pondering whether she was spending her life as she truly wanted. Baenninger was a tenured professor of psychology and an innovative administrator at The College of New Jersey. Yet she ventured from her career track to become an executive with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. “And that’s what started me on the road to becoming a college president,” says Baenninger, 58, who takes over as Drew’s next president on July 21. Currently the president of the College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota, Baenninger will become the 13th president in Drew’s 147-year history. She will replace Vivian A. Bull, Drew’s president since July 2012.

While Saint Benedict is a Catholic women’s college, closely allied with the all-male Saint John’s University nearby, Baenninger believes it shares many characteristics—and challenges— with Drew. “Both value liberal arts, a broad education and a focus on international programs, and both have aspirations in the arts and humanities,” she says. “Both have a social justice orientation and value community engagement. The same forces are also affecting the two schools. Trying to provide the best education you can for students, without making it impossible for them to afford it, is the reality of a college president’s life today.”

After three years at Middle States, Baenninger, a Philadelphia native, became president at Saint Benedict. Although the prospect of moving to the prairie was initially daunting, she says, “I fell in love with the college and the people there. In the beginning, people thought my personality was very forceful and East Coast. Now I don’t think anybody even thinks about that.”

Colleagues agree. “She’s a visionary leader, with a marvelous intellect and incredible people skills,” says Rita Kneusel, the provost at Saint Benedict. “Often she’s the smartest person in the room.”

The oldest of three children, Baenninger was the first in her family to attend college. After graduating from an all-girls Catholic high school in Pennsylvania, where she was student body president, she attended Gettysburg College. But she left during her first year, turned off by the “pervasive fraternity environment.” Baenninger married and had two children, and continued to take college classes, eventually graduating from Temple University in 1984. She earned her PhD in psychology from Temple in 1991.

Much of her scholarly work focused on cognitive differences between men and women. At Saint Benedict, Baenninger wrote an article on the persistence of “a gendered culture” in the United States, which, she says, “limits women’s expectations for themselves and our expectations for them.”

In her spare time, Baenninger likes to renovate houses, and she possesses the carpentry, electrical and plumbing skills to do much of the work herself. She is a fan of English crime writer Dorothy Sayers, likes to sew and is a passionate gardener.

Baenninger looks forward to moving closer to family on the East Coast. She expects to live on campus with her husband, Ron, and their 16-year-old standard poodle, Wimsey, named for Sayers’ fictional sleuth.

“I can’t wait,” she says. “I need some vacation time, because I haven’t had any downtime in a while. But I’m just very eager to be there and get started. I feel very drawn to Drew. The way I’ve been treated, by everyone, has left me feeling at home.”

In the meantime, Baenninger has plenty of ideas about “how to keep Drew moving forward” once she takes over. “Presidents usually take office during the summer, and that’s a very good thing,” she says. “You have time to get acclimated, so that when the faculty and students arrive in the fall you’ve gotten your sea legs. You’ve had time to formulate the questions you need to ask.”

]]>http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/04/meet-the-new-boss/feed/1Going Abroad, at Homehttp://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/04/going-abroad-at-home/
http://www.drewmagazine.com/2014/04/going-abroad-at-home/#commentsWed, 16 Apr 2014 17:54:42 +0000http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=7171A new partnership aims to boost the number of international students on campus.

By Elizabeth Moore

Andrew Bishop, a Drew senior, has roomed with an international student since his freshman year, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. This year he practices conversational Chinese with his Taiwanese roommate, and twice he’s traveled to China with his Korean roommate, once for a summer language program and again for a semester abroad.

“With an international roommate, you have the opportunity to engage in conversation, and take what you’re learning and put it into perspective,” says Bishop, a double major in political science and Chinese studies. Bishop’s cultural awareness helped him land an internship in the Washington office of U.S. Congressman Rob Andrews, where he worked with international constituents. “It helps make people more comfortable, and helps you to be more understanding,” he says. “It sensitizes you.”

Illustration by Yevgenia Nayberg

Bishop’s global approach to education dovetails favorably with recent research that finds employers seeking to hire more job candidates with intercultural experience. A Booz/Allen/Hamilton study from 2013 found that 88 percent of U.S. employers rank intercultural skills as fairly or highly important in the workplace. Meanwhile, a record number of nearly 820,000 international students studied in the United States last school year, contributing an estimated $24 billion into the U.S. economy, according to a study by the Institute of International Education. New Jersey colleges enrolled 15,634 foreign students in 2012–13, the study found, an increase of 3.2 percent from the prior school year.

Drew’s own legacy of international education goes back generations—the London Semester began in the fall of 1961—and future students will see their global learning opportunities expanded even further. The university recently formed an affiliation with INTO University Partnerships, which recruits students from across the globe to colleges in the United States, Asia and the United Kingdom. Starting this fall, about 130 foreign students are expected to enroll at Drew, joining an already thriving multinational campus, with nearly 50 students from 21 countries. Under the agreement with INTO, an estimated 500 foreign students will enroll at Drew over the next five years.

“The INTO partnership is an exciting venture for the Drew community and helps us build on our long-standing international programs at home and abroad, including launching the first United Nations Semester in the country in 1962,” says Drew President Vivian Bull. “Inviting more international undergraduates to join the Drew community offers the rest of the student body the opportunity to learn with, and from, their global peers, giving them an advantage in a highly connected world.”

Drew is the first small liberal arts college to enter into a recruiting agreement with INTO. For the organization, based in Brighton, England, the university’s appeal was enhanced by its proximity to New York City (the partnership will officially be known as INTO New York at Drew University). “Smaller, private, well-established liberal arts institutions like Drew have much to offer international students, but may not have the resources to reach them,” says John Sykes, INTO’s group managing director.

Christopher Taylor, the interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts, says the new venture can position Drew as “a vibrant nexus” for students who want to add an international flavor to their college education. “It will be the place where students come to learn about the world,” Taylor says, “and where the world comes to learn.”

Right on cue: Schaenen lines ’em up at a pool table in the Ehinger Center, a gift from the Class of 2013.

By Lynda Dexheimer

In 1983 Nancy Schaenen, then a drew trustee, set out to establish an annual tradition of giving by Drew’s graduating class. Her foresight helped create the Senior Gift, which Schaenen supplements each year with a donation of her own. Over the past three decades Drew’s senior classes have bequeathed the Forest with the clock outside the Ehinger Center, the deck outside the Commons and the courtyard benches outside Brothers College, among other special touches.

Schaenen, a Madison resident, modeled Drew’s Senior Gift Society after similar programs at both her alma mater (DePauw) and her husband Nelson’s (Cornell), and she believed such a gift could help Drew create a legacy of giving. “It’s an incentive for students to remain attached to and think about their school,” she says.

Civic engagement has long been valued at Drew, which in 2009 created a formal program for socially conscious students known as Civic Scholars. They participate in a four-year program designed to build leadership skills and devote more than 100 hours a year to community service projects. Here’s a glimpse into the busy lives of four Civic Scholars, all seniors, who are committed to solving problems on behalf of the common good.

Khemani Gibson

Khemani Gibson always liked community organizing. In high school, in Orange, N.J., he collaborated on an oral history project about his hometown, a faded industrial city with a declining population. “There were a lot of negative perceptions,” he says. “A lot of students didn’t see anything positive about Orange. They’d say it was not good or safe, and there was nothing happening.” Today Gibson leads a project for gifted middle school students in Orange. They’ll research and write a book about the city’s history for younger students. Gibson, who majors in history, Pan-African studies and Spanish, believes the effort will strengthen the students’ connection to the city and help them find their place in it. “Sometimes they struggle with how to balance being a scholar and being accepted by their peers,” he says. “I let them know it’s OK to be an intellectual.” Gibson plans to become an academic, but he believes community service is embedded in his DNA. “I really like inspiring people to reach their full potential,” he says. “I feel it’s part of my identity now.”

Megan Day

Megan Day cut her teeth on community service as a high school student working with the Tucson, Ariz., chapter of Amigos de las Américas, an international nonprofit that works on local improvement projects in Latin America. At Drew she completed four internships, including one last semester at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City. Two summers ago, when Arizona was aggressively defending its restrictive immigration law, she manned a busy hotline at the ACLU office in Phoenix. A political science and Spanish major, Day hopes to work for a nonprofit. “I was just brought up being taught that being successful is serving people,” she says. “I work harder when I’m working for someone else, and I enjoy it.”

Steven Ketchum

Steven Ketchum’s high school in Massachusetts required students to perform community service, so he collected donated toys and distributed them to poor families. At Drew, he says, he went “outside my comfort zone” to teach earth science to middle school students in Newark. A biochemistry major, Ketchum plans to study virology in graduate school. After that? “Depending on what I like at grad school, I’ll make vaccines, or look at new targets for drugs, or work with viral vectors for cancer therapy,” Ketchum says. Meanwhile, he takes the measure of each day: “I’ll be sitting in my room after I’ve done some homework and maybe played some games, and I’ll ask myself, ‘What did you do today that had a greater purpose?’”

Philomena Ogalo

Philomena Ogalo says her faith—and a mission trip she made to an impoverished community in Costa Rica when she was 16—shaped her sense of purpose. “I feel like I’m someone who is supposed to help people, in any manner I can,” she says. While a student at Red Bank (N.J.) Catholic High School, Ogalo counseled young people, ages 10 to 16, at her church, “helping them reach their full potential.” A first-generation American—her parents emigrated from Kenya—Ogalo majors in political science. An internship with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., sealed her career choice. In the fall she plans to attend law school. “I have a passion for social justice,” she says.

Based on self-disclosures from Drew and other institutions, Drew’s endowment, estimated at $205 million, generated a 2013 fiscal year rate of return of 13.3 percent. That exceeded the endowment fund yields at Yale (12.5 percent), Harvard (11.3 percent) and MIT (11.1 percent).

Compiled from contributions by alumni, parents, employees, corporations, foundations and others, Drew’s endowment is the second- largest source of revenue for the university.

A national study shows Drewids graduate with below-average student debt.

By Leslie Garisto Pfaff

“I was jumping for joy,” says junior Dayna Knight, describing her reaction when she learned she had been accepted to Drew.

But that exultant leap wasn’t prompted solely by the news of her admittance. She’d also learned that Drew offered a generous financial aid package that covered her tuition. The scholarships meant that, unlike so many others in her generation, Knight would not graduate with a crippling debt.

In fact, when it comes to student loan debt, Drew grads are doing better than most. A recent nationwide study from the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success found the average 2012 college graduate left school with $29,400 in debt. In New Jersey that figure fell to $29,287, according to the survey, while at Drew it fell even further, to $24,470. Of the New Jersey colleges that took part in the study, 15 had higher per-student debt averages than Drew, including the College of New Jersey ($33,889) and Felician College ($38,598).

Renée Volak, director of financial assistance at Drew, credits the university’s standing to its generous scholarship aid. During the 2012–13 academic year, Volak says, Drew students received roughly $30 million in scholarships, allowing some of them to pay as little for a four-year education at Drew as they might have at a New Jersey state college.

For Knight, an anthropology major, a Drew education meant being able to study in the small-college environment she’d set her sights on. And Drew’s financial assistance means that when she graduates she can concentrate on her career rather than her debts. “It’s not going to take me two decades to pay it off,” she says. And that, she notes, is “huge”—a word she can apply to her job prospects, not her student loans.